By all accounts, Susan Sontag found being alone intolerable. In Sigrid Nunez’s 2011 memoir,
Sempre Susan,
Sontag didn’t even want to drink her morning coffee or read the
newspaper without someone else around. When she was alone and unoccupied
by books, she tells Nunez, her “mind went blank” like “static on the
screen when a channel stops broadcasting.” Without others to respond to
her ideas, or a book to provoke them, the ideas vanished. Sontag herself
substantiates Nunez’s impression in the second volume of her journals,
As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh. The
tension visible here between the demands (and solace) of relationships
and the appeal (and terror) of solitude may be a basic human
circumstance. But women, in modern history, feel the tension with
special acuteness, we who are assumed to be talented at interaction and
rudderless when alone. It is striking that even Sontag, the most
authoritative and singular of public figures — the most masculine of
women intellectuals — also found the conflict vexing. The first volume
of the journals charted her heady, headlong ascent into sexual and
intellectual self-knowledge. This second volume, even as it spans the
period of her most important work, shows her running up against her own
limits. For Sontag, one of the most troubling of these was her
difficulty being alone.
Solitude is a problem for writers generally, who spend so much time
alone rehearsing a form of ideal communication. And men —as a practical
matter — are often worse at being alone than women. But for male
writers, however often an appearance of self-sufficiency can be stripped
away to reveal a hidden structure of support, there is a writerly
tradition of solitude that has existed at least since Romanticism:
Rousseau’s “my habits are those of solitude and not of men,” or
Shelley’s “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude.” A man who chooses to be
alone assumes the glamour of his forebears. A woman’s aloneness makes
us suspicious: Even today it carries connotations of reluctance and
abandonment, on the one hand, and selfishness and disobedience, on the
other. Kate Bolick, writer of
a much-discussed piece in
The Atlantic
about the “rise of single women,” became something of a spectacle for
suggesting that she was happy, at 39, being unmarried and on her own.
Albeit strangely titillated, many readers rallied to believe her. The
rest called her deluded. Sontag disliked
how much she relied on others, and deplored her neediness and attempts
to please. In the journals, she repeatedly accuses herself of “feeding”
on people for their talents or knowledge. She would be more herself if
she could only “consume less of what others produce.” Even the
conversation she loves and lives for is suspect. She wastes herself in
talk; she should talk less about her ideas because this means she is
less likely to write about them. It makes sense that Sontag experiences
being alone as an intellectual loss when she associates aloneness so
closely with genius. In an entry from 1966, when she is 33, she
dismisses herself as not having a “first rate” mind, and blames her
inadequacy in part on being too dependent: “My character, my
sensibility, is ultimately too conventional . . . I’m not mad enough,
not obsessed enough.” What advances she has made she attributes to not
having to “package + dilute” her responses for another person, as she
had to do with her ex-husband Philip Rieff or her former lover Irene
Fornes.
Her
friendship with Jasper Johns, on the other hand, lets her untie the
package: “He makes it feel natural + good + right to be crazy.” (...)
Being a genius may require being especially alone. But at least one
reason to be famous (if not necessarily a genius) is to be alone no
longer. Sontag points this out one morning in Prague, at breakfast by
herself — so we have record of at least one breakfast eaten solo — and
yet the main point of the entry is her surprised discovery of the
pleasure she’s taking in solitude. It’s July of 1966, and she is at a
hotel. She drinks her coffee, eats “two boiled eggs, Prague ham, [a]
roll with honey,” and finds herself content for the first time in
months. She doesn’t feel distracted or inhibited, and she doesn’t feel
childish; instead she feels “tranquil, whole, ADULT.” Her novel may be
stalled, her heart recently broken, but for a minute or two, sitting by
herself at a table covered by a spotless tablecloth, her son asleep
upstairs, she is at ease. She sounds hopeful, even pleased with herself.
“I must learn to be alone—” she vows. Yet the resolution is less than
persuasive, provoked, as it seems, by necessity. Eleven years later,
when her relationship to a woman named Nicole has foundered, she is
still telling herself the same thing: “Remember: this could be my one
chance, and the last, to be a first-rate writer. One can never be alone
enough to write.” One function of the declaration is clear: to convince
herself there can at least be a purpose to her unhappiness in love.
That she would never feel finished with her work; never satisfied;
never recognized in the way she wanted, as first a novelist and second a
critic; that she died believing she would recover, as her son David
Rieff (the editor of the journals) has noted — all of this makes these
resolutions especially poignant. Then again, most people need
resolutions they can’t help but break, just to get by.
Vivian Gornick, Sontag’s fellow critic and contemporary (Gornick was
born just two years later), tried to puzzle out something that seems to
have confused Sontag, and is genuinely confusing: the relationship
between solitude and romantic love. In Gornick’s 1978 collection,
Essays on Feminism,
she argues that, at least for women, solitude is necessary because
marriage, its apparent opposite, usually gets in the way of thinking,
growth, self-knowledge. In fact marriage, per Gornick, is the original,
distorting expectation imposed on a woman’s life — distorting because it
has been viewed, by both men and women, as the “pivotal experience of
[a woman’s] psychic development,” her crowning achievement. Gornick
outlines the consequences of the idea in one long, electrifying
sentence: “It is this conviction, primarily, that reduces and ultimately
destroys in women that flow of psychic energy that is fed in men from
birth by the anxious knowledge given them that one is alone in this
world; that one is never taken care of; that life is a naked battle
between fear and desire, and that fear is kept in abeyance only through
the recurrent surge of desire; that desire is whetted only if it is
reinforced by the capacity to experience oneself; that the capacity to
experience oneself is everything.” The promise of marriage is the
promise of togetherness, support, safety, and this prevents a woman from
taking responsibility for her own life — and therefore ultimately from
“experiencing” herself — by removing the motivation behind all important
action, which is the terror of aloneness. In Sontag’s envy of those
writers who knew how to be alone runs a current of precisely this
motivating terror. Her fear of being too much by herself fuels her
desire to join the club.
For all of her skepticism of marriage, Gornick, who married and
divorced twice, didn’t exactly give up on love. In “On the Progress of
Feminism” she describes a friend — not a feminist, she is quick to point
out — who wearily pronounces love dead. Maybe it is love, this friend
says, that is keeping us from self-realization. The proposition appalls
Gornick. “No,” she protests “hotly” —we need to learn to love anew. If
we can stop being “in love with the ritual of love,” its tired
conventions and seductive abstractions, maybe we can achieve a “free,
full-hearted, eminently proportionate way of loving.” Women aren’t the
only ones who suffer in marriage, but because marriage is so “damnably
central” to us, we are always the more comprehensively wounded party.
And because we have more to lose, “it is incumbent on us to understand
that we participate in these marriages because we have no strong sense
of self with which to demand and give substantial love, it is incumbent
on us to make marriages that will not curtail the free, full functioning
of that self.”
Is romantic love the enemy of a necessary aloneness? Or is it only
through learning to be truly alone that we become capable of romantic
love? Put differently, is independence a necessary precondition for any
relationship or, instead, an end in itself? In Gornick we feel this
dilemma being lived but not quite framed. It would be heartening to
find, in her oeuvre, a woman who’d been able to do something like what
she envisioned, a woman unscathed by her romantic past, in full
possession of the answers to her questions, a mature and sober literary
hero. We can find a likeness of this image in her work, but so can we
find something more provisional and trapped, a person battling the same
impulses and limitations her whole life, winning some, losing some,
never arriving definitively. In
Fierce Attachments
(a memoir of her relationship with her mother that is as much a memoir
of her relationship to romantic love), she describes being questioned by
a friend about her stoicism in the face of long singledom — “You seem
never to think about it,” he says to her, meaning men, or rather being
without one — and as he speaks she has a vision: “I saw myself lying on a
bed in late afternoon, a man’s face buried in my neck, his hand moving
slowly up my thigh over my hip . . .” Poor Vivian, transfixed by her
internal picture, is so “stunned by loss” she can’t even speak.
by Emily Cooke, The New Inquiry |
Read more:
Susan Sontag, photographed by Peter Hujar
